


Complications

by DancingInTheDark85



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Sick Tony
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-27
Updated: 2017-03-27
Packaged: 2018-10-11 17:06:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10469937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DancingInTheDark85/pseuds/DancingInTheDark85
Summary: Tony Stark wants to shut the world away to deal with the latest complication to his life, but it's a good thing his AI and teammates know what's better for him. Sick!Tony fic. No slash.





	

Tony Stark's day had sucked and he was exhausted but the heat from the shower was working wonders to clear the aches from his body and ease the pain in his head. He'd woken up feeling unwell, again, and the day had become progressively worse when he was dragged from his duvet cocoon by Jarvis alerting him that the Avengers had been called to assemble.

The threat, some madman with a robot army, had taken a few hours to get under control, and the team had escaped unscathed but it hadn't stopped Tony from throwing up, twice, during battle. The first time he hadn't even noticed he was going to and would have vomited into his suit had Jarvis not pre-emptied his condition and opened his visor for him just in time. The whole thing could have been a disaster, his reactions had been too slow and he could barely concentrate on the direction that Steve had been yelling over the comm link. He was glad it was all over and had been able to slink back to his tower, ignoring the disapproving looks from his teammates.

He'd chosen a shower and the prospect of bed over attending the debrief and he knew there'd be hell to pay for that later but right now he didn't care. He scrubbed the sweat from his body and then took his time just enjoying the hot water of the powerful shower pound on his neck and shoulders before squirting a blob of shampoo onto his head and working it through his hair, when he took his hands away from his head he counted, with a feeling of detached curiosity, the amount of hair that had come away in his hand. He rinsed his head and his hands off, watching the dark hair and occasional greys disappear down the drain.

With a sigh he switched the water off and stepped out of the shower, grabbing his towel and drying himself off quickly before wrapping it round his waist and padding over to the mirror above the sink. He swiped the condensation away and stared at his reflection, lit pale blue by the arc reactor in his chest. Did he look older than before? He wondered to himself, or was it just tiredness? His hair was definitely getting thin now, he realised. There was a whispy bit just above his left ear that was sticking straight up, he tried to flatten it down but more hair just came off in his hand.

He'd been so engrossed in his own appearance, so what else was new, he thought to himself, that he hadn't noticed the bedroom door open. Tony hadn't bothered to close the door between his bedroom and the ensuite and so there was a clear line of sight between his bedroom door and the sink that Tony was currently stood at.

"Stark, we need to..." The authoritative voice of Steve Rodgers made Tony jump and turn around. The Captain's voice had drifted off though as he'd taken in the scene. "What happened to your hair?" He asked instead, seeing the mess of it on Tony's hand. The cold 'Captain America' tone was gone now, and Tony felt he was talking to a completely different person, an unsure boy from Brooklyn. It was that change in tone that stopped Tony throwing the super-soldier out of his room that instant.

Instead he sighed. "It's a side-effect of chemotherapy." He admitted.

"Chemotherapy?" Steve asked. "Why would you be having chemotherapy?"

"Well, you know how the first arc reactor was a lot cruder than this one." He said, tapping at the mechanics in his chest. "And that it gave me Palladium poisoning in my blood?"

So far Steve seemed to be following and adding two and two together before the engineer said it. He actually looked scared at what he was going to say, his hand was gripping the door frame as though letting go of it would cause him to sink to the floor.

"Well I fixed the Palladium poisoning but it turns out it may have caused some lasting damage. I have a kind of blood cancer, but the doctors are doing a good job at fixing it, so it's nothing to worry about." He finished flippantly.

"Nothing to worry about?" Steve repeated with disbelief.

"Things have come a long way since the 40's," Tony reminded him. "Even with the level of damage in my body, the outlook is good. I'll be back to normal before you know it."

Steve gave him a disbelieving look but relaxed his death grip on the door frame. "How long have you known?"

Tony though a moment, "about three months. I spent about a month trying to come up with a cure of my own that would be better than what the doctors were offering, but I'm an engineer not a biochemist and I was running out of time so I just went with what I was given. And it seems to be working so..." He shrugged as though the gesture was an appropriate end to the sentence.

"Running out of time sounds more serious than you were just leading me to believe." Steve said. He came into the room and sat on the end of Tony's bed, a sure sign that Tony was not going to be able to wrap this conversation up any time quickly. He was going to protest but then thought it not worth the hassle and said down on the huge bed with him.

"I have a tumour in my chest, it's quite big and as I already don't have much room in there to begin with," he indicated the arc reactor again, "it needed zapping as quick as possible."

"Who else knows?" Steve asked.

"Jarvis." Tony said, as though the AI was a real person. "He's kinda hard to keep secrets from."

"No one else?"

"Well, Pepper and I are having some issues, and she's on this extended business trip so I didn't want to bother her with it."

"You should've bothered us with it." Steve said. "Did you think we wouldn't notice?"

"Well you haven't so far." Tony pointed out. He wasn't sure how he felt about that, was it a good thing that he was good at hiding how he really felt, or was it that the people who he considered friends really hadn't been observant enough to notice when he was off his game. He sighed again, he knew that was unfair, he could be difficult to read at the best of times and often spent days in his lab away from them all and besides... "You thought I was hungover today didn't you?" Tony realised. "That's what you were coming to talk at me about."

Steve looked at him guiltily.

"How did you get in here anyway? My private rooms are supposed to be off limits."

"I asked Jarvis where you were and he let me right in. If I'd known you were in the shower..."

"No, but Jarvis knew. Traitor." He muttered under his breath at the machine.

"Look, even if my AI wasn't so sneaky I would have told you all at some point." He said, laying down on his bed, flat on his back with his legs dangling off it. "It's not like I thought I could keep it quiet forever. Although I did think about just locking myself into my lab for the next few months and just hoping there was no big Avenger-sized emergency in the mean time."

"You should've said something sooner." Steve said.

"Yeah well, truth is I didn't want to get benched."

"Tony, no one is going to think any less of you if you need some time off. Okay, let me correct that, no one except you." Steve said with a hint of a smile.

"No one except the people I don't have chance to save because I was too busy worrying about myself."

"What about all the people you my not be able to save because you weren't looking after yourself. Your health is important."

Tony shrugged.

"You're so calm about this, if it was me I'd be worried sick." Steve pointed out.

"I've told you. I'm going to be fine. Besides, I've been living on borrowed time since 2008 so anything else is a bonus. I should've died since too, a lot actually..." He said, thinking about his Palladium poisoning, New York and a handful of other times as well. "One day something will get me, but it doesn't look like it's going to be this so why should I worry?" He ran a hand over his face, careful not to run it through his hair in case it caused more to fall out. "Look this is another reason I didn't want to say anything, I don't want you worrying and I don't need wrapping in cotton wool."

Steve nodded. "Okay, I'll make a deal with you. If you promise you'll let us help you, I promise we won't overdo it. And I'll keep Fury off your back. Is that a deal?"

Tony just nodded.

"So," Steve lay down beside him, so that they were side by side staring up at the ceiling together. "This chemo, does it really suck?"

"Not always," Tony started, then laughed harshly, "today it does! Mostly I'm just tired."

"You push yourself too hard, if it's making you tired you should just do what your body tells you."

"Yeah, you're right. And it does make me tired, but that's not quite what I mean. I'm tired of all of it, the aches and pains and broken bones after a battle, the nightmares, the fact that even if there isn't a crazed megalomaniac trying to kill me, and there usually is, then my body seems to always want to kill me instead..."

"Wait," Steve said in a moment of panic, "when I caught you up on the roof the other night, you weren't...? Because I knew people in the army who felt like that and one of them... And you do seem intent on throwing yourself into harms way..."

"What?" Tony smiled at the Captain's inability to get the words out. "No Steve, I don't want to kill myself. Believe it or not, even in my most self-destructive phase, I never have. I throw myself into harms way because I've never been able to do anything by halves. And like I said, I'm living on borrowed time anyway and I think I'm cool with that. I have far too much to make up for, and I'm nowhere near done." And then he grinned, "Besides, why would I want to kill me, I'm my own biggest fan!"

Steve managed a smile too, "you're not wrong there! But you know it's okay to feel that way right? Down tools for a bit and look after yourself. It can't be easy."

Tony closed his eyes as he carried on talking, explaining it to Steve who just listened intently. For once he didn't feel like he was just relaying information to a colleague, but was actually having a chat with a friend.

Steve left soon after allowing Tony time to crawl into bed and sleep his exhaustion off. He dreamed he was back in Afghanistan, as he did most nights but this time as he crawled out of the Humvee it wasn't those poor young soldiers but instead it was his teammates strewn around him, their eyes gazing up accusingly at him, even in death. He awoke with such a start that his hand shot out and knocked into the bedside table causing it to rock. He grasped out to steady it and saw that someone had left on it a tall glass of his favourite smoothie and a couple of sandwiches with a note written in neat cursive. 'The world needs Iron Man, it's okay for Iron Man to need us.' Tony smiled, took a sip of his smoothie and settled back down into a more restful sleep, and for the first time in years he slept through the night.

**Author's Note:**

> Clearly, as always, I don't own any of these characters and am making no money from this. You may have guessed that there's a reason I wrote this particular story, and not only because I've just watched Civil War and got back into Avengers fanfiction. The cancer that Tony has in this fic is called Hodgkin's Lymphoma and is a kind of blood cancer which affects the lymph nodes. Why am I so specific? Because right now I have an arc reactor-sized lump of it in my own chest. Don't worry, for Tony, and for myself, it's easily treatable and the chemo is working. Few months and I'll be back to normal. I figured of all people, someone with an arc reactor taking up valuable breathing room would know a bit of how I feel right now.


End file.
